From: EricMurph-AT-aol.com Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 21:40:07 EST Subject: Re: PMC: What is Postmodernism? A Demand. Bayard Bell: Belated greetings; I too have been away from this place that is no place for some time: time that was not gained but wasted in thinking. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your earlier post of two weeks back. It was very thoughtful and provocative. Even though I wrote words to which you responded, what you said did not negate what I felt I said as much as expand upon it. Reading your post, I found myself agreeing in substance with the words you wrote. (Which is not to imply that we are in consensus.) Certainly, I agree with you that pain is a necessary component of the sublime. Even if I did not mention it, I certainly knew it must be there when I wrote even if that is not what I said. I believe either Burke or Kant once used the example of an individual in a cave watching a terrible storm as an example of the terror the sublime evokes. The individual experiences the terror, but since she is in a safe place, she can witness the experience aesthetically, without care or fear. Thus, pain is mingled with a kind of pleasure, due to the distancing effect that occurs within. If we have learned anything in this century about art and the sublime, it is that such noble detachment is no longer possible. The maelstrom has entered us. Our poor little narratives and representations can no longer keep the abyss at bay and on a leash. Terror is now as infinite as the garden of the forking paths. I agree that both Beckett and Kafka are exemplars of artists who found new ways in the still living past to present the unpresentable. (I am not familiar with Cixous, but reading your post makes me want to read her as well.) The task before us, however, is not merely to repeat their work, but to experiment and make new moves in the old game; to continue their efforts in ways that are open to different outcomes. Only the darkness can show us the way here. What we don't know can only help us. I have also been thinking about art. Somewhere Lyotard makes the point that for Kant, beauty can have no development. Since as a matter of reflective judgement, it forever eludes the concept; its universality does not depend on the idea. The beauties of Homer are not surpassed, but stand forever. However, with the sublime, this is not necessarily the case. The dynamic or infinite idea which the imagination strives in vain to present creates the possiblity of development: the sublime engenders the spectre of transformation. Where the bolt of the infinite strikes, the house no longer stands. Today it seems that art has lost more than its aura. The metanarrative of art has lost its emancipartory force. Art is dead, perhaps. Like God it has squandered its beauty. (selling it to the highest bidder) Yet, technology seems to offer new possibilities for art and the sublime, beyond the cult of craft, genius and the masterwork. To paraphrase Robert Creeley: "O sublime, where are you leading me now?" I have no idea here, or rather I have an idea which I can not fully present. It is a intution, perhaps, that when Lyotard calls on us to experiment, discover new rules, and become paralogical, he is doing more than just reviving an outmoded myth of the avant-garde, that modernist institution that was once, somehow, to save us all. Is it possible that art in its death throes may give birth to something else, no longer art and no longer emancipatory, but still filled with new possibilities? ------------------------------- Finally, what also struck me in your post was the indirect example it gave of differends. I must confess I usually have tended to think of the differend in a macro sort of way; as the difference between one social group and another. (democrat vs. republican/alien vs. human) In fact, the differend exists in the smallest possible microscopic space imaginable. Differends exist in a kind of Brownian motion as subatomic particles, nano-seconds, clouds, specks, ghosts and silences. How do we explore the differend that exists between each one of us, not to reach an facile consensus, but to learn to read the world with a greater complexity than we have ever done before? As Nietzsche once said: "I don't know that art makes us better, but it certainly makes us deeper." Perhaps, to explore the differend is to encounter such an art. Maybe this is the art that remains after art is dead.
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